Lab Members

Jocelyn Alfaro received her bachelor’s degree in biology from California State University, Northridge. She serves as a Research Associate I in the Marbán Lab, assisting on projects that focus on creating next-generation therapeutics by characterizing cardiosphere-derived cells to treat Duchenne muscular dystrophy.

Alessandra Ciullo, PhD, completed her master’s degree in medical biotechnology with honors at the University of Parma (Italy), where she also attained a second-level master’s degree on regenerative medicine. Ciullo earned her doctorate in integrative molecular medicine at the Center for Molecular Cardiology of the University of Zurich (Switzerland), in collaboration with the Swiss Institute for Regenerative Medicine and Cardiocentro Ticino, where she explored effective exo-based cardioprotective approaches as therapeutic candidates for ischemia-reperfusion injury. She moved to the Marbán Lab, where she is performing her first postdoc. Her work focuses on better understanding mechanisms underlying the cytoprotective effects exerted by cardiosphere-derived stem cells and extracellular vesicles in cardiovascular diseases

Liang Li graduated from the University of Central Florida with a biomedical science degree in 2010. He joined Cedars-Sinai in 2011 and began working in the Marbán Lab in 2019. Li is the small animal surgeon in the lab and is interested in various animal models such as myocardial infarction and ischemia reperfusion.